


Let's Trash Our Whole Afternoon

by dear_monday



Series: Magic Like What's In The Movies [2]
Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Day drinking, F/M, Tarot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-09 02:46:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11095275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dear_monday/pseuds/dear_monday
Summary: Most of Charlie's re-purposed tarot cards had cutout faces taped or pasted to them. He had a particular preference for unflattering photos - red eyes, double chin, mid-blink, mid-sneeze, mid-mouthful, the uglier the better. Tarot was weird and kind of scary. It was nice to see his friends' faces while he was doing it. He'd used a relatively tame photo of Dennis for the devil - bags under his eyes, a bit of grey showing in his hair - and Dennis had refused to speak to him for a week. Dee had stolen one of the cards with her face on it (a dog-eared ten of hearts withTH EMPЯISSwritten lopsidedly on it in magic marker) and replaced it with a well-lit, heavily made-up photo of her own choosing. Charlie had bitched, on the grounds that it threw off the aura of the card. Secretly, he'd thought she looked cute in the old photo. She'd been laughing in it, her eyes screwed shut and all her teeth showing, her hair falling in her face. Not dainty or girly, maybe, but cool. Like a chick you'd want to hang out with.





	Let's Trash Our Whole Afternoon

Charlie sat on the filthy couch with his eyes closed, barely breathing. The hot, still air felt thick and heavy, sticking in his lungs. It was like breathing syrup but it smelled like hot metal, like gasoline, like summer in the city. He paused with one hand hovering over the cards laid out in front of him, his forehead creased in a slight frown. He didn't bother with any of the fancy ritual stuff, crystals and candles and altars. A couple of years ago Dennis had given him a set of crystals carved with runes, and Charlie was pretty sure he'd used them for slingshot ammo. He could lay it on when he was reading the cards for paying customers, but when it was just him in his apartment in his underwear and a stained, sweaty t-shirt, it felt lame and sort of embarrassing. You didn't need any of that crap. You just had to _feel_ it.

He picked up three cards and flipped them over. The tower, the five of wands and the nine of swords. Disaster, petty squabbles and bad dreams. Nothing new there. He shuffled the cards again and spread them out facedown on the crowded coffee table, nudging an overflowing ashtray, a bundle of pigeon feathers and a couple of empty beer bottles out of the way. He drew three more cards. The ten of wands, the ten of swords and the fool. Oppression, overwork, failure and ignorance.

"Yeah, yeah," he muttered, gathering them up again. "Tell me something I don't know."

Most of Charlie's re-purposed tarot cards had cutout faces taped or pasted to them. He had a particular preference for unflattering photos - red eyes, double chin, mid-blink, mid-sneeze, mid-mouthful, the uglier the better. Tarot was weird and kind of scary. It was nice to see his friends' faces while he was doing it. He'd used a relatively tame photo of Dennis for the devil - bags under his eyes, a bit of grey showing in his hair - and Dennis had refused to speak to him for a week. Dee had stolen one of the cards with her face on it (a dog-eared ten of hearts with _TH EMP_ _Я_ _ISS_ written lopsidedly on it in magic marker) and replaced it with a well-lit, heavily made-up photo of her own choosing. Charlie had bitched, on the grounds that it threw off the aura of the card. Secretly, he'd thought she looked cute in the old photo. She'd been laughing in it, her eyes screwed shut and all her teeth showing, her hair falling in her face. Not dainty or girly, maybe, but cool. Like a chick you'd want to hang out with.

He returned the cards to the deck and drew one more at random. It was the three of cups (friendship and celebration; a baseball card with a pasted-on polaroid of Dee and Mac, both passed out drunk and lying half on top of each other, mouths slack and clothes rumpled), but there was something sticky on the back and it had brought another card out with it. Carefully, Charlie unstuck it. It was cups again - the ace, this time. The ace of cups was for new love, and it had had a grainy candid photograph of the waitress attached to it, but it seemed to have come off.

"Huh," said Charlie.

He was still staring down at the card, frowning slightly, when someone banged on the door.

"Yeah?" he called, not getting up off the couch.

The door swung open. Dee was standing outside, but she seemed reluctant to come in, which was understandable, given the apartment's track record. It didn't take kindly to visitors. "Hey," she said. "You seen Frank?"

"Naw, he went out two days ago. I haven't seen him." Sometimes, when Frank was out doing whatever it was that he did, Charlie got kind of lonely. He'd been thinking about summoning the howling, formless spirits of the void to join him for movie night again if Frank wasn't back by that evening.

"Shit. You got any idea when he's gonna be back?"

"You're the psychic, you tell me," said Charlie, yawning. It was too hot. Everything was slow and weird, like an old record spinning at half speed. "I think he's still under the bridge. What do you want Frank for?"

"Money. I'm going to the convenience store. You wanna get wasted?"

Charlie thought about it for a beat. It wasn't like he had anything else to do. Besides, day drinking with Dee was always a good time. You never knew what was going to happen or where you were going to end up. Last time, they'd wound up hammered at two in the afternoon, so they'd gone to the roller rink where they'd both laughed and fallen down a lot, and then to a diner for milkshakes, where Charlie had barfed on the floor and they'd had to book it. The time before that, they'd started making cupcakes and ended up trying to hex the last asshole who'd screwed Dee over instead. Charlie had heard that the guy was being audited, so maybe it had worked after all.

"Yeah," he said. "Alright."

  

*

 

"Oh, yeah," breathed Dee, as they stepped into the air conditioned cool of the convenience store. "Oh, goddamn, that's the stuff."

Charlie was sweating through his shirt, the damp cotton sticking under his armpits and across his shoulders after the short walk from the apartment. Dee led the way to the chiller cabinet. It was humming, setting Charlie's teeth on edge.

"Hey," said Dee. "You got any cash?"

"No."

"Me neither." Dee looked over her shoulder. "Here, look--" she pulled Charlie in front of her and leant into the cabinet, shoving cans into her purse.

"Hands," she muttered, after a minute. "C'mon, if you can carry a couple more we'll have enough to get good and drunk."

Charlie obligingly put his hands behind his back and Dee pushed two more cans on him.

"Okay," she whispered. "Let's get out of here. Nice and slow."

Casually, they walked back towards the exit.

"Hey," said Charlie, out of the corner of his mouth. "He's watching us."

"Be cool," muttered Dee. " _Slowly_ , asshole, Jesus Christ, can you just act normal for five minutes?"

They sauntered down the aisle, pretending to look at chips. At least, they were pretending to look at chips at first. After a minute, all Charlie could think about was how badly he wanted some chips. He was just weighing up the pros and cons of ditching one of the beers so he could carry a family size bag of Cheetos instead when Dee grabbed his arm.

"Fuck," she hissed. "He's coming this way. Run!" She took off, sprinting towards the door, the cans in her purse clunking dully together. They ran, the sun beating down on them, their sneakers slapping against the sidewalk. Charlie could hear someone laughing, and it took him a minute to realize that it was him. They tore across the street, both gasping for breath, clutching at each other's sweaty hands as brakes screeched and a car horn honked somewhere behind them.

The convenience store guy's yells followed them for a few blocks then dropped off, and they slowed to a walk. Dee was sweating, her cheeks flushed and her hair sticking to her face. Charlie cracked one of the cans open and beer foamed out, dripping over his fingers and onto the sidewalk. It had gotten pretty badly shaken up while they were running, but it was still good to drink.

"You wanna get the guys in on this?" said Charlie, taking a long sip of his beer. Some of it ended up down his shirt. He didn't bother trying to wipe it off. "I could call Mac and Dennis."

Secretly, he was kind of hoping she'd say no. Mac and Dennis were cool, and they had fun when they were all out solving mysteries together, even if they didn't always do a very good job. There was Frank, of course, who was pretty much the best buddy a guy could ask for. And then... then there was Dee. Charlie wasn't very good with girls, or so they'd always told him, but he thought he was good with Dee. Things were easy, with her. They'd been hanging out a lot lately. Sometimes they kissed, and that was pretty sweet, and sometimes they didn't, and that was pretty sweet too. She was tough and weird and loud and drunk all the time, and he liked the way she smiled.

Maybe he was kind of stupid for her. That wasn't so bad, he didn't think. There were worse things, for sure.

"Nah," said Dee. "Fuck those guys. We stole it, it's our beer. Oh, but you wanna invite the thing in the bathroom? It might appreciate a nice cold one."

"It's still in the dog house," said Charlie. "You know, after what happened with Dennis."

A little while back, Dennis had wound up possessed by the eldritch horror that lived in Frank and Charlie's bathroom. Using Dennis' body, it had ranted and raved, shrieking and howling and demanding worship. It had broken all the glasses in the bar before taking a baseball bat to the windows. It had been two weeks before any of the others noticed anything out of the ordinary.

By the time they got back to Frank and Charlie's building they were both two beers in and they stumbled past the broken down elevator and up the stairs, giggling and shoving at each other. Charlie had cursed the apartment door so thoroughly that the actual keys were kind of surplus to requirements now, which was probably for the best, because he'd used them for a banishing ritual last fall and he hadn't seen them since. He kicked the door open.

"Tarot practice, huh?" said Dee, looking down at the cards still laid out on the table. She picked one up and examined it. "This is a shitty fucking picture of me, you asshole."

"Yeah," said Charlie, happily. The card she'd picked up was the sun. The picture was from one day last summer when they'd all gotten drunk in the park and she'd been lying in the grass, her fair hair fanned out around her head. Mac had been holding the camera, and he'd managed to catch her from an angle that gave her seven chins and a giant nose.

"Alright," Charlie said, sitting down on the couch and clapping his hands together. "Beer me."

  

*

 

The beer was all gone and Charlie had opened a bottle of the moonshine he and Frank sometimes made in the tub, with the assistance of the thing that lived in the bathroom. They'd started on the couch, Charlie was almost sure, but at some point they'd both slid down to the floor as the sun sank towards the horizon and the light moved lazily over their bodies. It was still hot enough in the apartment that Charlie's t-shirt was clinging to him and his hands felt sticky. The tarot cards were scattered on the floor all around them. Charlie had been picking them up at random and Dee had been trying to read his mind and tell him what they were without looking. Dee's guesses had started badly and gotten more and more wrong as they'd worked their way through the beer and then the moonshine.

"Okay," Charlie said, groping for another card. "Okay, okay, okay. What's this one? Are you--? Don't _look_ , you bitch, that's the... that's the whole game! What's the card?"

Dee closed her eyes pressed her fingers to her temples. "I see... the twenty-three of motorbikes."

"Amazing," said Charlie, dropping the four of wands and picking up another card. "Okay, now this one."

"Uh... the seventeen of janitors."

"You've got a gift," Charlie told her. She rolled over and shoved at him, but she rolled herself too far and her forehead smacked against Charlie's. He could smell her shampoo and feel her breath on his face and the sun was in his eyes, but he was laughing. He was still laughing when she closed the space between them and kissed him, but she was as wasted as he was and she sort of... missed, her open mouth skidding along his jaw instead.

"Oops," Charlie muttered. He reached out and touched her hair. It was knotted and damp with sweat but it looked so pretty in the sunshine, like it was made of light. He kissed the corner of her mouth. One of the cards had gotten stuck to her arm. It was kind of nice, just lying there on the floor and making out. She tasted like beer.

"Oh, shit," she said, indistinctly, after a minute, closing her eyes. "Charlie, everything's lookin'... real fucking spinny."

"Mm," he said. Everything was looking kind of spinny, but he was drunk and happy and he was kissing his best friend. This was heaven.

She rolled over onto her back and put one hand up to shield her eyes from the sunlight. "Fuck," she said, drawing the word out on a groan. "Oh, fuck, Charlie, I'm so fucking wasted. I should... I should go home."

"You can stay here, if you want," said Charlie. "You can even have the bed."

She looked over him and smiled. It was a drunk, sloppy smile, her hair messed up and her eyes half-closed. "Nah," she said. "I'll go home. I just need, like, five minutes. To rest my eyes."

Charlie watched her for a minute. He was pretty sure she'd fallen asleep. He got unsteadily to his feet and stumbled over to the bed, tripping over two empty beer cans and a box of shotgun shells. He grabbed the ratty old blanket and gave it a quick shake to dislodge the worst of the debris, then carried it back over to where Dee was still lying sprawled out on the floor. He threw the blanket over her, then got down on his knees and unstuck the card from her arm. It was the faceless ace of cups again. It wasn't a card that came up very often when in his readings. It was a card for the beginnings of things, for happiness, for love.

And it was missing a face.

Dee was snoring quietly, open-mouthed. Charlie reached into her purse for her cell phone, and opened the camera.


End file.
